On the CodeBlog they've posted a review of a recent release from Packt Publishing about using the FuelPHP framework for beginners.

I’ve been playing around with FuelPHP for a while and despite the fact that I haven’t used it in production, it has been on my watch list ever since I first saw it. When I saw the new book about FuelPHP by Ross Tweedie, I was eager to read it – here’s my feedback about. If you just want to buy the book, you can get it at Amazon or directly from Packt Publishing.

The review looks at each chapter and provides an overview of its contents (seven of them). It also talks some about the target audience for the book - intermediate to advanced PHP developers wanting to learn more about the framework. To be clear, this is not an "introduction to PHP" book too. He points out some of the "bads" about the book including major concepts being explained too high-level and confusion about what exactly to do in certain steps of the process.

Should I read this book? It depends on your background – I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re a PHP programmer who hasn’t worked with namespaces, databases before. [...] I’d definitely recommend to book if you worked with other frameworks like CodeIgniter, Yii, Zend .. before and now want to have a look at FuelPHP. You’ll get a good impression about its possibilities!

Thomas Hunter has posted a (nice long) book review of the Packt Publishing book "CouchDB and PHP Web Development" to his site.

When I first picked up this book, I was expecting a boring, text-book approach to code examples for PHP talking with CouchDB. Boy was I wrong. What I found was a book that has you build a complete working application. And by complete, I mean you’ll add the Twitter Bootstrap framework and it will be sexy.

He mentions parts of the app you'll create - a PHP framework, 3rd party libraries, working with git/github - and goes through the sections of the book, talking about good and bad points along the way. Chapters cover things like: an introduction to NoSQL, REST/HTTP verbs, installation/config of CouchDB, using version control and deploying the app using the PHPFog PaaS hosting.

Gonzalo Ayuso has posted a book review of a Packt Publishing book "CouchDB and PHP Web Development":

Finally the new Book “CouchDB and PHP Web Development” written by Tim Juravich is ready an in my hands. It was my first experience as technical reviewer. The author contacted me by email and the editor sent me book chapters to review. Basically I gave my opinion, I test the code and I hunt for bugs. It was a great experience. Now is really cool to see the book in my hands.

Overall, he gives it a positive review (for a beginner level book) and points out a few things that can help make the reading experience better, like the "Time for Action" sections. He also was happy with the author's choice of using the Twitter Bootstrap for the interface of the sample application.

On Dzone.com there's a book review from Ivan Ilijasic covering a recently released title from Packt Publishing, the "PHP Ajax Cookbook" (by Milan Sedliak, Rajesh Jeba R. Anbiah and Roshan Bhattarai). His review gives a "one minute bottom line" about the book and its contents.

I've been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books - complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service "mashups" and mobile app development.

On the AjaxRay site today there's a new review of an introductory book from Packt Publishing about unofficial wiki is a BIG try to help in this issue. Besides, recently Packt has published the first book on Kohana “Kohana 3.0 Beginner’s Guide“. Jason D. Straughan wrote this book for Kohana version 3.x.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it’s purpose. I felt it’s capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I’d recommend it for Kohana beginners.

On PHPClasses.org there's a new post reviewing a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development" (a second edition) by Martin Brampton.

In this review I focus on the changes between the editions of the book, which are brief and objective, since the core of the work remains the same and with the same quality. [...] In sum, I recommend reading this book to those looking forward to improve their skills in PHP, or intend to create new frameworks. To put it simply, a good book to read, and with new tricks to learn.

He (the reviewer, Alexandre Altair de Melo) briefly looks at these differences between the versions, with the largest being in Chapter 15 - the building of a sample application to apply all of the theory learned in the rest of the book. You can find more information about the book on Packt's website here.

Chris Hartjes has posted a new book review to his blog today of the Packt Publishing release the "CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook". Like many other traditional "cookbook" style books, it provides a set of solutions to common issues CakePHP developers might come across.

personally find the "cookbook" style of books to be the most helpful. They enable me to quickly find answers to the problem "show me how to do something realistic using your tool". Hello World doesn't cut it for the tools I need to use. [...] Like any well-thought-out book, they cover the main components of CakePHP. One of the thing I liked was that you didn't have to necessarily read the book from front-to-back in order to get something from it.

He mentions other positive things about the book - like the chapter on using the command-line tools that come with CakePHP - and one of the negatives (not so much about the book as it is the CakePHP project's choices).

Michelangelo van Dam has posted a new book review today about an offering from from Packt Publishing - CMS Design Using PHP and jQuery.

After receiving the book I started reading it. But right from the start the author displayed bad practices and mis-use of PHP. Reading the book from front to back, the author Kae Verens (@kae_verens) has confronted me with bad use of variables (like $a, $b, $c), bad use of PHP structures and a complete wrong approach of using JavaScript, where JavaScript should enrich an application instead of incorporating business logic.

In his "good" category fell things like the interesting variety of jQuery plugins mentioned and how the CMS example was broken up into easily digestible chunks. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book falls into his "bad" and "ugly" category" including the structure of the application, the quality of the code and the lack of filtering/validation that was done on input.

Chris Hartjes has posted his review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP 5 Social Networking" they had asked him to review.

I'm glad I decided to take a look at this book. It's pretty dense at 450+ pages, but it really does work you through from start to finish how to build a small social networking site in PHP. Okay, it's about dinosaurs, but let's not quibble. I'm not into long-depth book reviews, so we can talk about what I liked about this book.

He likes the consistency of the book's approach to the subject and points out that it promotes refactoring and improving code over striking out and using something new and trendy. He also mentions their emphasis on security. The one thing he didn't like about the book was a simple one - there were no unit tests to back up any of the code in the book.

New from Query7.com today there's a book review of a release from Packt Publishing titled "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" covering the creation of a custom CMS system from the ground up.

PHP5 CMS Framework Development is a 322 page book that covers all aspects of creating a full featured content management system (CMS) in PHP5. The author Martin Brampton has a history of developing extensions for the Mambo and Joomla CMS projects. He became lead developer of the CMS Mambo before starting his own CMS, Aliro. The book is split up into 14 chapters. The first is an introduction to CMS and PHP5 concepts and the remaining 13 each look at a key feature of the CMS.

The review covers the contents of the book in a bit more depth, talking about a few chapters specifically and how they felt it was overall a "great learning experience". He mentions a few negatives about the book, however - the code examples are all pulled from an existing CMS (Aliro), the conventions used in them and the heavy use of singletons. He still recommends it if you're looking to write your own CMS, though. It still provides some good insight into the methods and pieces that make them up.